The Universal Serial Bus (USB) has become the dominant interface used for connecting Human Interface Devices (HIDs) such as mice, keyboards and game controllers to Personal Computers (PCs). This dominance is starting to extend to non-PC computing platforms, such as game consoles.
Wireless HIDs are not currently natively supported by any computing platform, and they therefore require a base station or dongle to be attached to the PC or game console to act as a local interface between a wired USB connection provided by the platform and the wireless remote device. Typically, such dongles present an interface to the USB host on the platform such that the software running on the platform is unaware that the HID is wireless. The dongle creates a virtual wired HID for interfacing to the platform.
For reasons both of convenience and economy, it is desirable to have a single dongle to link multiple wireless HIDs to the USB host. This is the current practice with wireless HIDs connected to PCs. This is achieved by having the dongle virtualize multiple HIDs over a single USB connection, typically by means of multiple alternate interfaces.
However, in multi-player games, consoles typically associate the port to which a HID is connected with a given game player. Thus in a 2-player game, the HID connected to port 1 will control the game play of player 1 and the HID connected to port 2 controls the game play of player 2. It is therefore conventionally not possible to use a single dongle connected to a single USB port to connect to multiple wireless HIDs.